Denys Baptiste - Sense of Belonging
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
There is a very spiritual and natural quality to the saxophone playing of Denys Baptiste.
His latest album, the first in a long while, marks the return of a player who has the ability to inspire others to find a new path, and yet draw in freshly created meanings to the panoply of his musical persona. With the release of Identity By Subtraction this month these processes are set to expand dramatically. Stuart Nicholson talks to Baptiste, about what matters to him most, and in what amounts to a wake-up call about what it really means to be a jazz musician, hears some home truths from Baptiste that young musicians everywhere would do well to heed.
From his 1999 debut album Be Where You Are it was immediately apparent that Denys Baptiste was a man to watch. With a Mercury nomination and a MOBO award under his belt, his career moved into the fast lane. Courtney Pine’s glowing encomium that he was “one of the strongest tenor saxophonists this country has ever produced,” did not seem wide of the mark when he picked up a Rising Star award in 2000 and by the time he came to release his second album Alternating Currents the following year, he was confronting a dilemma unfamiliar to most British jazz musicians – how to follow on from his early success. The answer was simple, become bigger and better, and with extra horns and vocals the critical acclaim again rolled in.
His third album, 2003’s Let Freedom Ring was nominated for best album and best new work in the BBC Jazz Awards, Best Jazz Act in the MOBO Awards, and Best Album in the Parliamentary Jazz Awards. But after extensive touring over the next year, the next big step in his career never quite materialised. The reason was simple. A dedicated family man, he had other priorities. “The last few years I have been spending a lot of time bringing up a family, and music has taken a little bit of a back seat while I’ve been doing this,” he says. “It’s something that I wanted to do, and spend a lot of time doing.”
This is an extract from Jazzwise Issue #148 – to read the full article click here to subscribe and receive a FREE CD...